L’ultimo combat di Voltaire. Realtà e narrazione, retorica e stilistica in difesa della libertà

In the “happy exile” of Ferney, Voltaire never stopped writing in order to act. This book reconstructs and analyzes his longest battle: the Jura affair, in defense of the mainmortables, victims of ancient privileges against the backdrop of Enlightenment France. Through an investigation of literary texts, polemical writings, and historical documents, Cristina Trinchero shows how Voltaire transforms an apparently peripheral legal and social controversy into a central issue of Enlightenment thought: freedom as a non-negotiable value. His commitment to the emancipation of the inhabitants of the Jura becomes a narrative and rhetorical laboratory in which reality and fiction, irony and pathos, satire and compassion shape a strategy of cultural intervention. This is a mature Voltaire, less inclined to a corrosive smile and more determined to awaken the reader’s sensitivity through a militant form of writing capable of combining rational argument with emotional appeal. In addressing the complexity of a "combat philosophique" that has remained on the margins of criticism, the book examines the reception and literary elaboration of the figure of the subject enslaved by centuries-old privileges, taken as an emblem of the Ancien Régime and as the object of a process of myth-making in narrative, poetic, and theatrical texts of the revolutionary and post-revolutionary periods. At the crossroads of literary studies, intellectual history, and discourse analysis, this comprehensive re-reading of yet another battle to "écraser l’infâme" highlights the function of writing as a privileged space for mediating between historical reality, intellectual action, and the production of themes, motifs, formulas, and images: for Voltaire, the literary word remains, to the very end, an instrument of freedom.